Metal Reviews

Thx Brahm, will do.

Finished A Clockwork Orange, and now I'm working on The Hobbit.

One of me favorites.

Finished the John Gray bullshit last night. Started reading Camus' Stranger for the second time. It's a lot more interesting now that I have a background in the existentialism and relativism.

Both are great books. ACO, in particular, is one of the most chilling novels I've ever read.

Philip K. Dick- Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep?

Excellent, excellent book.

I picked up a collection of short stories by Bukowski today. Severely underrated author if there ever was one.

Re-reading One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.
All time favorite book.

Re-read The Stranger. Frig mentioned the atheism in it. That's really only like two pages worth of content. Looking at it for the existentialism themes is where it's at.

Stephen Pressfield- Gates of Fire

Infinite Jest is ridiculous. It's so good and so huge. I don't think I'm gonna finish it before school starts :(

Read some Allan Sillitoe. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is almost as good as the song which borrowed its name. The rest of the short stories were nice working class tales which I enjoyed.

Read Forget Foucault by Jean Baudrillard. It's basically Foucault can only describe what he does so well because it has already passed and is no longer relevant. That and insert tons of Baudrillard's own philosophy of production, simulation and death that went over my head.

Now reading Planet of Slums by Mike Davis. Verso books for the win!

clearly i'm missing something. it's a nice book, i liked how things ended for Jezal and Glokta, but all in all it's a good book at best. a gritty page-turner but light-years behind ASoIaF.

i especially disliked the way jezal goes from being a vain, retarded asshole to a noble and eloquent king with barely any transition but for the fact that he suddenly had a crown on his head.

José Saramago - As Intermitências da Morte (Death With Interruptions)

people simply stop dying. quite good so far.

I thought Jezal's transformation was actually done pretty well; Abercrombie I think showed how easy it is to think you've change when you're away from home and how hard it is to maintain that change when you've returned, particularly through his and Logan's arcs. I also enjoyed that while Jezal did become the "good king", he's still an idiot and is completely inneffectual.

Otherwise, I just loved how we learn what a self delusional bastard Logen is in this book, and how Abercrombie strips away the romanticism from barbarian heroes. I also appreciated that Bayaz, the cliche of the kindly but grumpy wizard, being the villain. Basically I thought it just ended spectacularly and that Abercrombie never betrayed his cynicism.

Tim Powers- The Anubis Gates

Just finished Planet of Slums. Written like a sociology text, it explained example after example about how SAPs have turned the third world into a land of slums and gated communities with no middle ground. Shit floats down stream contaminating and polluting people's drinking water as they live in shantytowns with little to subsist on. There is no majestic, romantic life for a bum; they are an exploited underclass of marginalized citizens, expendable to the system.

It describes "hot demolitions" which is where slumlords send flaming cats through shantytowns in order to set them ablaze so the slumlords can collect the insurance. And the "wage puzzle" of how Africans in some areas make so little money (legally, illegally, formally, informally) researchers simply do not understand how they can survive.

It's a brilliant book on land inequality. Mike Davis, the author, is a well known Marxist sociologist who is absolutely amazing when he kicks into theory mode as opposed to science mode. His ultimate thesis becomes in the epilogue when the U.S. military is practicing invading urban centers who are they planning on exterminating? Terrorists or the poor people pushed to the brink living in their own and others' shit, infected with cholera, AIDS, dysentery and in debt to the World Bank twice as much as it would take to treat these wide epidemics, raping their families.

I bought Godel Escher Bach yesterday. Will start it someday.

Great book. I especially like the Achilles And The Tortoise anecdotes between each main chapter.

Heh, sounds neat, I've been meaning to read some of his stuff.

NR:

A load of Weber/Taylorism/Labour Process Theory, trying to understand these subjects properly before I have to do seminars on them.

Also, just reaching the fun part of Capital, where the chapters stop being called things like "Money, or the circulation of commodities" and start being called things like "Bloody legislation against the expropriated since the 15th century".